I've played maybe a quarter of these, so I'm not very familiar with a lot of the games, especially the earlier ones.

I'm still messing around with my game plans and one of many the issues with my last game was that nobody knew that there was a secret faction until the 2nd to last day. We came dangerously close to the secret faction winning without anyone know they were there. A secret faction win is perfectly ok, as long as they are discovered at some point before game end. It's made me question whether I even have the skill to do anything secret.

My question is, was there a game with a secret faction(s) that people liked?

That might be a loaded question. I personally do *not* like secret anythings (and I'm usually pretty vocal about it). Ionitor/Ozy's game might have been the exception to that. Basically, if I feel like I'm fighting the GM more than I am the other players, then I'm not enjoying myself - and my analysis-style of play is more suited to knowing the parameters that I have to work with.

The Final Five in Omega & Ozy's game 15 was well executed, but there were some concerns with show-knowledge v. not-show-knowledge on that one. People with show knowledge would've been clued in to the secret faction much earlier and had more of an advantage than those that didn't.

Maybe the Mafia game (Omega/Ozy game 30) - but I think that one ended up being imbalanced a bit because of the secret faction(s), I'm not sure. I seem to recall that the original wolves had almost no chance of winning because of the secret wolves, or something like that.

I don't think it's necessarily the secrecy that's the problem with most secret factions - it almost always tends to be a balance issue. It's also relatively important to *not* hide too much in the narrative; at some point, you have to very specifically tell people what you want them to know in the official-GM voice, and not the narrator-voice.

I tend to agree that it's balance and analysis that's the problem with secret factions. To me, conversion factions in particular play hell with analysis and can be nigh unstoppable if not shut down early. I'm talking about balance, not the "OMG VAMPIRES!!! " thing I have going on because I just play that for laughs. Mostly ...

I thought my dead faction would be ok because it didn't convert and since the players were dead anyway, it wouldn't impact voting analysis. But I was wrong and it was OP, and the living barely won by the skin of their teeth. Just to be clear, I was perfectly ok with a dead win, I just wasn't happy that nobody knew about them till the game's climax. I think that goes back to your point about people needing to be properly told as opposed to just clues left out.

I included a dead faction so that 1) players killed in the early game would have something to do and 2) as a sort of fail safe against the game ending too quick. I was concerned that either the humans or wolves would be too powerful and the dead were there to sort of keep things in balance until the end.

FWIW, I keep talking about my game, because it's the one most on my mind right now, not because it was the "best" game or something.

I really liked Ionitor's Inception game with hidden faction. But were the infiltrators really a hidden faction? The game reset and all players were returned to life, and the GM clarified the new purpose of the game, to find and eliminate the hidden players ignoring the temporary wolf/human assignments. While they weren't a traditional wolf group, I thought it worked perfectly well.

But not the vigilante virus thing. I realize that was in the game at least partly to provide some balance, but I honestly think the virus got too much help from the GM.

Overall, though, that game went so well, I'd be amazed if people weren't jumping up and down for another Inception game before too long.

DastardlyOldMan wrote:That might be a loaded question. I personally do *not* like secret anythings (and I'm usually pretty vocal about it). Ionitor/Ozy's game might have been the exception to that. Basically, if I feel like I'm fighting the GM more than I am the other players, then I'm not enjoying myself - and my analysis-style of play is more suited to knowing the parameters that I have to work with.

The Final Five in Omega & Ozy's game 15 was well executed, but there were some concerns with show-knowledge v. not-show-knowledge on that one. People with show knowledge would've been clued in to the secret faction much earlier and had more of an advantage than those that didn't.

Maybe the Mafia game (Omega/Ozy game 30) - but I think that one ended up being imbalanced a bit because of the secret faction(s), I'm not sure. I seem to recall that the original wolves had almost no chance of winning because of the secret wolves, or something like that.

I don't think it's necessarily the secrecy that's the problem with most secret factions - it almost always tends to be a balance issue. It's also relatively important to *not* hide too much in the narrative; at some point, you have to very specifically tell people what you want them to know in the official-GM voice, and not the narrator-voice.

I'm sensing a pattern here....

W/r/t the Cylons & Final 5, the (original) Cylons needed to make the jump that those missed mauls were effectly Seer visions. I don't recall that they ever did.

W/r/t Vegas, the original mafia could have won easily, but look at their targets, I think they both tried to convert the same player one night and other just coincidental decisions.

Right on - I was stretching my memory a bit on those, and I wasn't overly active in either (I think I skipped the mafia game, and was mauled fairly early on in the BSG game), but I seemed to remember dead-thread discussion about some issues.

While it may have sounded critical (rereading it), those were intended as the good examples, IMHO. Omega probably does secret the best of any that I've played, but that's also a personal preference thing. The whole "there are no wolves" or "everyone's a wolf" style of game/metagame were totally not my cup of tea. That's the one thing about secret games that I like to not be secret, though: when I'm signing up for the game, I'd like to have some idea of what game I'm playing. If there are going to be secrets, I'd personally prefer that the GM say "there's going to be secrets" - before I agree to play that game. (We've hashed this one out before, so I'll leave it at that).

DastardlyOldMan wrote:Maybe the Mafia game (Omega/Ozy game 30) - but I think that one ended up being imbalanced a bit because of the secret faction(s), I'm not sure. I seem to recall that the original wolves had almost no chance of winning because of the secret wolves, or something like that.

W/r/t Vegas, the original mafia could have won easily, but look at their targets, I think they both tried to convert the same player one night and other just coincidental decisions.

I think what DOM's referring to is that the Original Mafia foot soldier PLAYERS had very little chance of making it to the end of the game.

I think Omega and I balanced the game so that the two Original Mafia TEAMS had the same chance of winning as the Humans or the two Secret two-man Gangs team (yes, it was a five-faction game).

Though it's hard to say, because the two Original Mafia teams decided to go into what was basically open war with one another, which made it easier for the Secret Gangs to take over the Original Mafia teams.